[lbo-talk] I don't get it..

[Brad DeLong]

>Dennis Perrin wrote:
>>
>>  I always liked Chomsky's take, which I think is pretty accurate:
>>  The Cuban Missile Crisis established the right of the US to
>>  place nukes on the border of any enemy, as it did in Turkey,
>>  aimed at the SU, but no one else had that right, esp the SU.
>>  And JFK was willing to risk nuclear war to enforce this.
>
>Did Chomsky actually say that?  Only a couple months after the blockade
>we'd pulled all our nuclear-armed Jupiter IRBMs out of Turkey; that was
>the deal Kennedy made with Khrushchev at the height of the Crisis.
>
>Good for Khrushchev too, because with a surprise attack by ICBMs the
>time from first detection by the forward radar bases until warheads hit
>airbases and cities was 30 to 40 minutes, in which period a U.S.
>president or a Soviet premier had to find out whether that image on the
>radar screen was a bunch of ICBMs, a flock of loons, or the moon rising,
>and to decide whether or not to launch a world-wrecking retaliatory
>attack.  But with IRBMs, that period from detection to detonation was a
>mere six to ten minutes.  As a result of forcing the issue by stationing
>Soviet IRBMs in Cuba, Khrushchev succeeded in greatly lessening the
>danger of accidental nuclear war.

True. But surely that was an unexpected benefit?

Brad DeLong